Rarely does one find Eugene Onegin as fresh and fine-tuned as it is in
Glyndebourne's current production, says Rupert Christiansen

There’s nothing very complicated about Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: it offers few subtleties or ambiguities, and being originally composed for students, it’s not hugely difficult to sing or play. Its essential simplicity means that it seldom emerges in a dud performance: it has the same fail-safe directness of melodic and emotional appeal as La Bohème.

But rarely does one find it as fresh and fine-tuned as it is inGlyndebourne’s current production – a beautiful revival of Graham Vick’s 1994 staging which makes an exemplary virtue of simplicity. Pallidly coloured curtains and bare walls make up much of Richard Hudson’s minimally furnished set; the costuming reflects the Regency period of Pushkin’s original verse novel. Nothing is bizarre or tricksy, yet Vick’s poetic touch is evident throughout, and masterly: one never forgets the self-consecrating baptismal gesture with which Tatyana anoints herself at the end of the Letter Scene, or the brilliant invisible handling of Lensky and Onegin’s duel.

And the show is shot through with some of the best dancing I have ever seen on an opera stage: bravo Ron Howell for choreographing everything from a peasant stomp to a country ball to a grand Petipa pas de deux in such dramatically plausible and stylish fashion.

Ekaterina Scherbachenko (Cardiff Singer of the World in 2009) is a melancholy and withdrawn Tatyana, who sings the Letter Scene – that dark night of the teenage soul – with moving sincerity and good taste: there isn’t a hint of a star soprano trying to grandstand it.

Her Onegin, Andrei Bondarenko, is a smug popinjay, whose air of sophisticated disdain is precisely what makes him so attractive to the naïve Tatyana. Singing with smooth grace and musical control, he radiates cool. If only he had heated up for the final scene, which falls slightly flat for want of vulgar bodice-ripping ardour and vocal hell-for-leather.

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Edgaras Montvidas may not have the most melting of tenorial timbres, but he milks Lensky’s aria for all its worth and looks the part of the romantic poet to a tee. The solemn Gremin (Tara Shtonda), feisty Olga (Ekaterina Sergeeva), clucking Larina and Filipyevna (Diana Montague and Irina Tchistjakova) and dainty Triquet (Francois Piolino) couldn’t be bettered.

The chorus is just magnificent too, and theLondon Philharmonic, seemingly energised rather than exhausted by its Rosenkavalier exertions, played immaculately under the acutely sensitive baton of Omer Meir Welber. Altogether a lovely treat.